Miracle Baby
By Tom Deiker

(continued)

“Some miracle babies,” Mr. Kudlaty tells us, “we know the reason. Like the alien babies you read about in The Sun, there’s always an alien father, at least the ones so far. Or one of our most famous cases, the son of Bigfoot. His mother was kidnapped and kept in Bigfoot’s cave for months before she was rescued.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” says Charlayne. “How in the world did she ever hold on to her sanity after such an unspeakable horror?”

“Actually,” says Mr. Kudlaty, “she said Bigfoot was quite gentle, with sad yellow eyes, just like his child has.”

I remember myself reading about the Bigfoot baby in The Sun. Mr. Kudlaty left out the part about how Bigfoot smelled to high heaven, but I didn’t think Charlayne needed to hear that part. I guess you know that Bigfoot is himself part human in the opinion of most experts.

Then Mr. Kudlaty tells us about the teenage girl who had all the signs of being pregnant, but swears on a stack of Bibles that she’s never been with a man or boy either one. “Now this is a shocking case,” he says, “and you may think it explains April Meshell’s birth, but you’ll see it doesn’t. When that teenage girl kept getting bigger and bigger her mother took her to the doctor for a pregnancy test. Which she wasn’t. So they do an MRI on her, and found a tumor in her stomach. And when they operated, to the doctors’ complete amazement they discovered not a tumor, but a small, live octopus, which had attached itself to the teenage girl’s stomach wall.”

Well, Charlayne almost tossed her cookies on that one, and I wasn’t feeling too good either with the thought of what that misfortunate teenage girl must have gone through. “The doctor who removed the octopus,” Mr. Kudlaty goes on, “he told us at The Sun that she probably had swallowed an octopus egg sack — they’re real tiny — while swimming in the ocean. So that teenage girl wasn’t pregnant after all. The octopus was a parasite, just like a tapeworm is.”

“But that doesn’t explain April Meshell’s birth,” Mr. Kudlaty told us, “because she grew inside her mother’s womb and was born in a completely normal way. So sometimes we don’t have a explanation for a miracle baby. I think April Meshell is more like those cases in medical books where babies are born part fish or part reptile. I think April Meshell and those others are the result of a genetic mutation, which by the way is exactly what most doctors say.”

That sure set our minds to rest — Charlayne’s and mine — to finally have an expert like Mr. Kudlaty explain April Meshell’s condition.

It was me who came up with the idea about getting together with other parents of miracle babies. I was saying to Miriam and Charlayne one night how I wished we could meet the family of the werewolf baby, that we might have a lot in common. The werewolf baby, if you remember that case, wasn’t really part werewolf, only part ordinary wolf, so that case is almost exactly like little April Meshell’s. Werewolf was just the name they gave him to add interest to the story, according to Mr. Kudlaty.

Miriam thought my idea was a good one, and Charlayne did too after we talked it over. “It would be a comfort to meet families who have carried the same cross as us,” says Charlayne. “Kind of like a group therapy.”